Reading
Intent
Birchfield Primary School has a clear, consistent, whole school approach to the teaching of reading. Our intention is that all children leave our school being able to read confidently and fluently in order to access all areas of the curriculum, as reading is fundamental to many aspects of life. By supporting our children to develop their reading skills, we aim to prepare children for the next stage of their academic journey and to have a love of reading for pleasure, as well as reading for meaning.
The Teaching of Reading at Birchfield
At Birchfield Primary School children are exposed to a wide range of high-quality texts. In Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, phonics is taught use the Little Wandle program. Please see phonics resources button for more information. Comprehension texts are carefully chosen to ensure progression throughout the academic year, as well as year on year throughout the school. Extensive research is undertaken to find the best books for each year group, which link to the wider curriculum as well as being age and content appropriate. Considerations are given to the balance of pure text and picture books, genre, texts by different authors, with a balance of male and female authors and illustrators. Non-fiction books/texts, poetry and songs are also used to develop reading skills, they are very important and are included in our overviews to ensure they are given the same profile as the fiction texts.
We teach the reading skills VIPERS. Vocabulary, Inference, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Sequence within whole class reading (WCR) lessons are taught four times per week. During these lessons vocabulary is explicitly taught and modelled and a key skill is modelled in each lesson. Children are given the opportunity to practise their fluency and read aloud, then an application activity is completed collaboratively or independently.
All children in Key Stage Two will have the chance to develop their comprehension skills in discussion-rich lessons. Over the course of the year each year group will be studying a wide, diverse range of fiction texts, poetry, non fiction texts and songs, which will expose them to a huge range of authors, genres and writing styles. It is important that we help to build our children's contextual knowledge through reading, enabling them to draw on this in future texts to support their understanding. The carefully chosen texts will provide reading to topics studied in foundation subjects, and link to other themes such as Black History, Refugees, PSHE and topical issues such as climate change.
In each lesson the children have the opportunity to apply a range of comprehension skills to the chosen text. However, there will always be one specific skill that is modelled by the teacher at the start of the lesson, providing clear strategies for the children to use. We explicitly teach strategies for the following skills within our lessons:
Vocabulary
Inference
Predict
Explain
Retrieve
Summarise
The main focus is on discussion; we want to allow pupils time to share their ideas and thoughts with their partner and the class, developing their inference skills and ability to articulate and justify their ideas. They will also have chance to independently apply their skills at the end of the lesson answering a range of questions in written form.
More than anything, we hope to foster a real enthusiasm and love for reading, encouraging our children to read for pleasure, helping them to discover texts, authors and genres they can enjoy in their own time and building habits that will hopefully last a lifetime.
Click on the tab to the left to see our reading spine.
1-1 Reading and Home Reading
1-1 reading happens regularly across school. Alongside this, Reception and Year 1 complete three group reads a week. The aim is that every child will be listened to at least fortnightly and identified pupils are read with multiple times a week.
Reception and Year 1 read books from the Little Wandle Scheme. Year 2 and UKS2 children are assessed through Accelerated Leader and children choose a book at their level. Children in every class are expected to read at home, using books from school (or books from home), for at least 10 minutes a day.
Additional time is allocated within the school day to ensure that each child is reading regularly. This can also be through the use of reading volunteers and additional adults.
Reading for Pleasure
We believe it is important for all children to read and for every child to be read to. Children have access to high quality and diverse texts during their reading for pleasure sessions (these take place in the library). Class texts are chosen and read daily. During this time, fluency is modelled to pupils, discussions around the text takes place and children are given the opportunity to discuss books they have read and recommend books to their peers.